Redesign and Facilities Move of Transfemoral Sheath Production Line for Edwards Lifesciences, LLC
Abstract/Summary
The TF Sheath production line, in its current state, was producing products in an inefficient manner with limited resources due to a small demand and no immediate need to make changes. Once the product was available for sale in the United States, demand increased by over 300%. The purpose of this project is to study and analyze the current TF Sheath production line and make recommendations for the line in order to meet the upcoming demand while keeping added resources to a minimum. The objectives for this project are to keep the production on schedule, decrease product travel distance, decrease cycle time of the product, clear floor space in the current location, and recommend new resources that are needed to meet future demand. The current state process flow and location and product travel distance of the production line was studied first to solve this problem. The future state production schedule was used to determine future state takt times for the product. Once the current state was identified, multiple alternatives for process flow and location and product travel distance were developed and evaluated for efficiency improvement and cost to implement. After reviewing the alternatives, the option to move the production line to a different location, add 2 operators to the line, and use more efficient equipment was recommended to improve the cycle time of the product and meet the future production schedule. These recommendations result in 79% reduction in product cycle time and 50% reduction in product travel time on average with approximately $1000 in costs. Overall, this project has allowed use of multiple industrial engineering topics and the opportunity to apply them to a real‐life problem. By using industrial engineering knowledge, the results satisfy all stated project objectives and improve the production line with minimum costs.